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Thanksgiving Food

Thanksgiving dinner:

Persimmon and Pomegranate salad with Arugula and Hazelnuts, from the Lucques cookbook: a delicious and light start to the heavier courses to come. (Watch Suzanne Goin and Martha Stewart make this salad.)

Chestnut Stuffing, as delicious as the first time.

Roast Chicken with potatoes. Simple and wonderful.

Pumpkin Pie with Spiced Walnut Streusel. Lovely the first night still warm; even better the second day cold; and, I'm guessing, better yet the third day. I'll know, tomorrow!

But the best of all, frankly, were the sandwiches we made tonight: leftover roast chicken, stuffing, cranberry sauce, homemade mayonnaise, and frisée, all on toasted white bread; served alongside roasted brussels sprouts with bacon, the only way to make them: roasted for 20-25 minutes at a high temperature until they're almost blackened on the outside.

Soup (and faith) with Prince

Last week's New Yorker had a brief & strange article about Prince in Talk of the Town. My favorite part was this bit about his Jehovah's Witness faith:

He attends meetings at a local Kingdom Hall, and, like his fellow-witnesses, he leaves his gated community from time to time to knock on doors and proselytize. "Sometimes people act surprised, but mostly they're really cool about it," he said.

Serious Music

Il Divo's performance of "Hallelujah" is the most sincere thing, ever (via Idolator):

Treasure

My favorite in the series:

Bread

Oh, the things that you can do with bread!

1. Suzanne Goin's Chestnut Stuffing (from Lucques), with fennel, pancetta, and many other wonderful things. This was the side dish to a veal chop, marinated in thyme, rosemary, garlic, and olive oil, and which was itself incredible, and yet: I'm going back for the stuffing.

2. Bread Pudding, from Simply Recipes. Odds are, you've got everything you need to make this bread pudding; I decided to make it at 9pm, because I wanted something sweet, and I had leftover bread from the stuffing, and, because I'm a normal person, I have milk, vanilla, eggs, sugar, and spices. And that's all you need! And it's absolutely delicious.

Call it

I'm watching No Country for Old Men for the third or fourth time tonight, and damn is it an incredible movie. And this scene, well:

When Obama Won

Oh, and we have a new president, too! I like that, a lot.

In the days preceding the election, I--like a lot of people, I suspect--realized that it was starting to seem pretty real; that we may actually, you know, have a president that we can believe in, yes, but also one who broke through some pretty fundamental (historically) barriers. That's really enough to make you tear up, honestly.

But so anyway, there are so many fantastic photos of President Obama (that sounds good, doesn't it?), but here's my favorite of all of them, because at heart, I'm a total sap, and I really like his family, and damn, don't they all look pretty happy to see each other?

Steak!

Dinner tonight: a boneless ribeye (around 10oz), pan-roasted, with a shallot & red wine sauce; fries [1]; and a watercress salad dressed with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Absolutely wonderful.

And here's a photo, albeit taken with an iPhone:

[1] This is a great, easy recipe for french fries. But that recipe there doesn't say how long the fries will take, which makes it difficult to time against the other stuff you might be making. So, from my experience, it's somewhere between 15 minutes, or around the time it'll take to heat your pan, cook your steak, and let it rest for a couple of minutes. Which is sort of perfect, really.

Brando

I loved this quote from the recent New Yorker article about Marlon Brando (sadly, not online), about Brando's attempts to reconnect with himself/his family in the 80s (emphasis mine):

At home in Beverly Hills, he saw a psychiatrist several times a week, slowly learning to "be the child I never had a chance to be." At the same time, divorced again and the father of nine (by his own count; the actual number is uncertain), he was trying "to get to know my children better." The efforts involved in these two ventures--becoming a child, becoming a father--were rarely compatible.

Frustrations

Amazon's Frustration-Free Packaging is a fantastic idea: environmentally conscious, safe, easy-to-open.

And, to make it more entertaining, there's a gallery of photos and videos (like the one to the right) submitted by Amazon customers, demonstrating the evils of modern packaging.